How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia [ハードカバー]

Techniques are covered include lighting, aspect ratio, tracks, film grade, and codes. And yes, there is the requisite film history, which is heavily condensed and goes through individual directors, countries, and certain genres in film. As only one chapter's devoted to it, but it's a quick cram-course in who's who, who-directed-what?, who-starred-in-what?, and what was going on in such-and-such a country.

Another interesting concept is the terms film, cinema, and movies. The terms are defined in the way we look at the medium. Film is what it's called in relationship to the world, i.e. politics. Cinema refers to a more aesthetic and intellectual stance. And movie is a named when defined as a consumer-oriented, economic commodity. The terminology is interesting when one defines a performance as the sum of the actor's persona in conflict with the role he plays.

Monaco then spends some time discussing the two schools, expressionism/formalism versus neorealism/functionalism. Expressionism, derived in Germany from such masters as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, focuses on the inner aspect of humanity, using symbols, stereotypes, stylization, which eventually influenced directors such as Hitchcock and Welles. Formalism, more from the Soviet masters like Sergei Eisenstein, is more analytic and scientific, concerned with technique. There are discussions of montage (series of shots that advance the action) vs. mis-en-scene (deep focus photography that allows more audience participation in the film experience) and the schools of thought that argued in favour of one over the other. There's an interesting observation by Andre Bazin, who saw film as the asymptote to reality, the imaginary line that nears but never touches reality, which if put into conjunction into the earlier definition of film being something that can't be explained.

All this leds to multimedia and virtual reality. Most of the latter deals with the information age, detailing the history of computers and Internet, which led to the control and access to information. This ties in with the ethics regarding copyright in the merging of texts, images and sound, and downloading MP3's in this postmodernist, recontextualization of art, where film sits squarely. Doesn't this surely affect burning DVD's from the Net, which serves to accelerate already shrinking box office takings? Monaco quotes Lenin on how ethics is the esthetics of the future, sums this dilemma up pretty well.

Monaco uses the example of David Bowman, the astronaut in 2001, and the virtual cage he's in at the end of the movie, to describe how our closed personalized environments, created to block out the noisy outside world, may give us security, i.e. Discmans, cellphones, VCR viewings as opposed to theatrical outings, but at the cost of losing touch visually and morally from our surroundings. Invaluable due to its being not only about the past of film, but its future as well.